


Shards And Links

by Gryphonrhi



Series: Horton's Legacy [2]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-17
Updated: 2010-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-07 08:18:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryphonrhi/pseuds/Gryphonrhi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Horton turned in on himself; Joe Dawson prefers to turn to his friends, especially after he finds Horton's diary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shards And Links

**Author's Note:**

  * For [killabeez](https://archiveofourown.org/users/killabeez/gifts).



"So. Do you want to talk about it?"

Joe Dawson looked up, surprised out of his thoughts. From his comfortable seat on the couch, throw blanket over his thighs, a double (now single) shot of whiskey arranged at hand, and the fire built up in front of him, he couldn't see Mac over the fireplace... but he knew that tone of voice. Deliberately mild, carefully not pushing, Mac was making the first move toward finding out why his Watcher had invited himself for dinnerat the last minute and shown up in dire need of cosseting.

"Not yet," the bluesman finally sighed, his voice gravelly with tension and stress despite the whiskey. "It's nothing following me, Mac."

He could almost see the half-smile that tended to flash in one corner of Mac's mouth before vanishing again, the light it lent his friend's eyes that stayed there long after the smile was gone -- all those familiar motions were contained in the amused, comfortable tone of voice. "I didn't think it was. Dinner'll be ready in about half an hour. D'you want garlic bread with the stew?"

"Yeah, that'd be good. You want a hand with it?"

"Stay over there and get warm, Joe. You looked frozen." The comfortable sounds of cooking drifted over from kitchen: a knife rocking against a cutting board, the characteristic sound of a metal top coming off a glass jar, the dull rattle of the tray on the steel island. They were the little noises that meant home, and friendship, and sanctuary from the storm -- all the things the Highlander emanated as reflexively as he breathed.

Duncan walked over and sat down at last, glass in hand, and Joe watched, bemused, as the fire tinted his white wine to a particularly fiery orange. When he looked over at Mac, though, his friend's eyes reflected the flames, too, as he watched the dancing blue incandescence along the base of a log. For the Watcher, the knowledge that he didn't have to talk just yet dropped the last tumbler of the lock into place, and the words finally began to spill out.

"I found something in my desk today." He stopped there, unsure of how to go on, what to say, and the comments snarled and tangled in memories until they couldn't come out anymore. But it was like playing blues, too, another howling, raging grief that insisted on ripping its way out of his fingertips and mouth... so somehow Joe kept talking as his hands flexed and knotted on the edges of the blanket.

"An old journal. Not mine," he added firmly, and he could almost feel his breathing ease with Mac's attentive silence. "It.... James kept a diary, apparently."

To his relief, Mac's voice was still level when he asked, "Your brother-in-law? That James?"

"Yeah." Joe caught his lower lip between his teeth, worrying at it for a moment as he nodded. Individual nubs of wool from the blanket ran rough across guitar calluses as his fists clenched in the fabric. "Yeah," he sighed as the words began to flow at last, "that James. The thing was pretty damn scary, buddy. We missed it. We missed it big. He started going nuts a long time ago, and we never saw it. Nobody saw a goddamn bit of it, and I know the Council sent him up for a mandatory psych evaluation years ago."

"They do that?" Duncan asked, still quiet, still not letting his voice betray anger, or impatience, or any of half-a-dozen emotions that Joe would have felt in his place, probably because that might have kept the Watcher from continuing his story. Nothing could stop this now that it had started, though.

"In a heartbeat, Mac. Somethin' really major goes wrong, or they decide from the reports that some field Watcher is really losing it... or should be," he rumbled, voice gone rough and determined again. Joe remembered talks he'd had with the good doctors while the Watchers restructured themselves after half the senior European Field Coordinators died and Shapiro was under house arrest for killing one immortal and trying to kill another.

"Oh, yeah," Joe growled, still irritated by the memory of patient questions about problems he wasn't having, "they can order psych evaluations. And it's never good for your career with the Watchers. 'Cause they never forget that they had to bring you in."

Mac turned from studying the fire and glanced at Joe, his eyes intent and his face worried. Joe could see the moment when he tucked those concerns and feelings aside as irrelevant at the moment; after all, he'd Watched Duncan do it enough times before. But the immortal just nodded, as if something in what Joe had said made sense, and went to refill his wine glass.

"How bad was it?"

Duncan's voice was almost disembodied, coming as it did out of those parts of the loft that Joe's fire-dazzled eyes weren't seeing yet, and the Watcher gave him the same honesty he'd have given to a ghost: utter, absolute truth, untainted by prevarication, because who knew what the dead could see?

"It scared the shit out of me, Mac. It was like I could hear his voice while I was reading it, like his ghost was standing over my shoulder. And the worst part was that it almost made sense. You know the logic puzzles where it takes you hours to figure out why it's wrong, while all the time your gut knows damn good and well it's wrong but you can't prove it to save your life? It was like that. It terrified me, Mac -- because it made sense while I was reading it."

Joe's voice, that trained musician's instrument, nearly broke under the despairing force he put into those words. _My hands are trembling again,_ he realized when he felt the way the blanket gaped and tugged between them and that he was doing it. And then a warm, strong grip caught his shoulders, and Mac squeezed down with just enough pressure that he couldn't ignore it. And finally, finally, Joe Dawson gave himself over to the shudders he'd been restraining since he'd thrown the damn book across a room not an hour before.

They washed over him in waves, a chilled, numb foreshadowing of pain to come that reminded him of the day he woke up in a hospital and couldn't move, couldn't quite feel, and only knew, hazily, that something was really, really wrong. It felt that bad, too, like some part of him had been cut to the bone, maybe severed, and the nerves were just now organizing to report it.

He knew the emotions pouring through him. What bluesman wouldn't? That was grief, and that was fear, and the glass-sharp thing right there was the first thin edge of hysteria.... Joe shoved it all away the same way he had the first time he'd woken up in rehab and been just far enough off the painkillers to realize what had happened and that it wasn't a dream, his legs were really gone.

When the shudders finally slowed, when he could breathe around the panic that had nearly choked him, Mac's hands still held his shoulders, the clasp as firm as it had been before he fell apart. He forced in a slow breath, expanding his lungs out the way he did before the start of an evening's set at the bar, and felt calm slowly settle around him like the afghan on his lap.

"Sorry, Mac," Joe sighed at last, grateful he hadn't broken down completely into tears. Just the shakes were embarrassing enough.

That got a familiar-sounding snort and he half-smiled even before his immortal pointed out, "Come on, Joe, we all fall apart occasionally. Me, too, you know." The hands on his shoulders dug carefully into the muscles, a massage intended as much to reassure as to release tension, and Dawson knew it. So he sat there and soaked up the heat of the fire and the warmth of Mac's friendship, let the pleasant burn of the whiskey in his stomach add to the pleasantly light-headed sensation that had followed his emotional upheaval.

Mac growled softly over the knots in his shoulders and back, and Joe amused himself by trying to guess which tensions would evoke the wordless commentary. But mostly, he sat there and listened to the hiss and pop of logs in the fire, and sighed when Duncan stopped rubbing his shoulders and went to check on dinner.

"Call it five minutes," the Highlander told him, as calm as if Watchers routinely came to his loft and fell completely apart. "Better now?"

"Yeah, thanks," Joe commented, still wrapped in the exhausted calm of catharsis.

"Did I ever tell you about a friend of mine, Elias Levy?" Duncan asked him, settling down in the armchair again and pushing Joe's refilled whiskey glass to him.

"No," Joe answered, curious now despite himself. "I think I remember the name, though. Didn't you work with him before World War II?"

"Yeah, that's him," Mac nodded. "Good man, too. He worked behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials when the war was over. He called it his penance."

"For what, Mac? If I'm remembering right, that man spent, what, six years in the European Resistance? We always suspected he was one of your contacts to smuggle Jews to Sweden."

"Mmm-hmm," the Highlander agreed, dark eyes focused on something that Joe couldn't see. He shook his head, in regret or sorrow, and looked back at his Watcher. "He was. He also went to one of Hitler's talks, Joe."

"So? A lotta people did, Mac."

"Yeah, they did. And like a lot of Germans," Mac told him grimly, "Elias came out of the rally supporting Hitler. From what he said, he was almost jittering with energy, convinced that the man was right, that his plan was correct, and that any sacrifice to achieve that goal was acceptable. Elias told me it took him half an hour, at least, before he stopped and realized that the people Hitler was talking about wiping out included him."

Duncan met Joe's eyes with his own, dark brown to hazel, wisdom and grief visible on both sides. His voice was almost unbearable in its husky gentleness as he said, "Half an hour, Joe. Thirty minutes that he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for. Don't do that to yourself, all right? It wasn't your fault."

The tall Scot stood up. "I'm going to dish up dinner. Stay here; we might as well eat in front of the fire."

Dinner was quiet, spent listening to the rain outside the window and the jazz station that Duncan eventually turned the radio to. And in that stillness, Joe had no choice but to listen to his own emotions, the muted rivers and currents running under his surface placidity.

That one was grief, a deep-buried vein of sorrow for the brother-in-law who'd made his sister so happy for so many years, for Lynn's father who'd never know that she'd gone on to get her M. A. and was working on a Ph. D. now.... Once upon a time -- back when Joe'd first met him -- James had been a Watcher and historian who'd thought his job worth the doing and the sacrifices. Helluva thing that the man had ended up first hating his job, and then hating immortals. _Most of us just quit the job_, Joe thought, and tried not to laugh at the gallows irony of it.

Because he knew some of his grief was for the immortals the Hunters had killed, too, and the pain felt by the friends they'd left behind. People like Fitz and Mac, who'd had to mourn Thackeray and Darius.

_Shit, James, why'd you have to kill the good ones, though? I mean, buddy, if you thought they were monsters, why didn't you kill the real monsters, folks like St. Cloud and Koren, Kantos or hell, even Kenny? Your Hunters killed people like Thackeray and Darius; tried to kill Carl Robinson, too, didn't you? Why?_

_Hell, I read your diary. You didn't think they were people, so I guess that made it okay to kill 'em._ Frustration twisted his mouth into a grimace, and Duncan saw it, but kept his own counsel.

Joe gave up examining the grief; it was an old familiar friend, running constantly under his thoughts because he understood too much, saw too much. Hazards of playing the blues, he knew. You heard other people's pains, gave them words and expression, and they became as familiar as your own, until the two merged and everything, looked at in anything more than a passing glance, showed its fine, diamond-blade edges. The edges that etched patterns into people's souls, made them react this way when hit by that problem....

Joe forced himself away from a contemplation of the blues as psychology and made himself look at the fear throbbing through his body and focused, he realized now, on the bullet scar Galati had given him.

_Did you just think the immortals would never figure out what happened? You had to kill Irena Galati, didn't you, James? Shit, the woman never even took a damn head, but you had to kill her in front of her husband. Do you know how many of us Jakob killed for that? And I can't even blame the sonuvabitch for shooting me. I'd've done the same damn thing, hurting like he was. You got Watchers killed, you idiot. You started a war with people who kill to live, and we were damn lucky that it was Jakob who came after us, instead of someone like Kronos or St. Cloud. You were stupid, James. You nearly got a lot of good people killed. You damn near got me killed._

Joe shook his head, wondering how many Watchers James had corrupted? How many of the deaths the Tribunal had marked against Joe Dawson's side of the ledger were really idiots who let the wrong immortal see them and how many of them were Hunters who found out the hard way that immortals would kill any threat to their survival, whether it involved taking a head or just stopping a heart?

_And we missed it. Jesus. He started wondering about this back with Wilmington. That was 1981 at the latest and probably before. Almost twenty years, he had this shit festering away in his mind and we missed it. How?_

Out loud, Joe commented, "You think you know someone...."

Duncan poured another half-finger of whiskey into the empty shot glass before adding mildly, "You're staying the night, by the way. You're not driving home like this, and all things considered, I think you're better off here tonight." He refilled his own wine, too. From the kitchen island, apparently contemplating the label on the bottle, Duncan asked quietly, "Did you think you knew him?"

"I used to, Mac. But I think the man I knew, the man my sister married, may have died a long damn time ago." Joe thought about that for a long while and then raised his glass to the fireplace in angry, ironic salute. "To Blake Wilmington's last victim."

"Wilmington?" Duncan was still frowning in puzzlement as he settled back into his seat. "Who?"

"Blake Wilmington was an Immortal who died back in the '80s," Joe answered with a sigh, eyes haunted with regrets. "The son of a bitch was responsible for an 'Amusement Park Massacre' that killed 127 folks... most of 'em kids." He glanced up to meet Duncan's eyes as he added, "James's first assignment."

"And the reason for his psych review?" Duncan asked, but he was already nodding his comprehension. "Is that what started it, do you think?"

"I wish I thought anything was that damn simple, Mac. No." Joe shook his head, slowly, finally beginning to end his grieving for his sister's pain, his own betrayal, for James Horton's death. "No. He had a flaw somewhere in the grain, and he just couldn't take that pressure. He didn't snap, but he... bent."

"Like Brian Cullen." Duncan lifted his own glass very slightly, eyes focused on something other than the room for that moment, and he smiled, a wistful smile that slid away to be replaced with a resigned echo of his own old pain.

"No." Joe denied that with a fierce shake of his head, tiredness and the alcohol combining to pour waves of dizziness over him at the vehemence of his protest. "No. James had a slow string of bad luck, yeah, but his immortals faced off against some good folk, too. And he could have requested a transfer long before he did. Hell, Mac, I wonder if he didn't lie to the shrinks. He started going wrong after Wilmington, long before he was transferred to anyone else. He let it go on and on for years... and never tried to stop, never tried to get help. Brian Cullen, now, he just got fucked by the Game and his own reputation, Mac." Joe's voice gentled suddenly, a downshift into sympathy, as he added, "Immortals can't really leave the Game. James could have gotten out of the field."

Duncan nodded again, dark hair and eyes gleaming in the firelight before he studied whatever revelations swirled in his wineglass. "I wasn't happy when I first found out about the Watchers, you know. When you get right down to it, Joe, you're peeping toms, spying on our lives in embarrassing detail."

He glanced up, serious and thoughtful as too few people ever saw him, and Joe decided, again, that he was glad he'd taken the risk of talking to this man. It had been worth everything he'd paid for it, and Duncan proved that again as he went on, "But there are times I think that the Watchers are our only real immortality. We don't have children, can't afford to be too conspicuous for too long." He and Joe traded glances, neither of them mentioning how much of a risk Byron had taken with all of their lives.

Eventually Duncan met his eyes evenly, not trying to hide his grief as he went on, "The closest we come to immortality is our students. If we're lucky."

Joe said softly, "And sometimes not even then, buddy. I know. I miss Rich too."

They let that hang between them because neither saw any reason to add to it. Jazz songs played and ended and were followed by more music, interrupted only the occasional crack or pop of the fire.

Duncan's voice fell into that stillness without disturbing it as he finally asked, "So what will you do with the journal?"

It wasn't the alcohol that answered for Joe, although he'd had more than a little whiskey, more than even that thick stew could soak up. Even the adrenaline-aftermath didn't really do it, he admitted later. Joe's own temper rose up, encouraged by his sense of basic decency and a desire to never see again anything so close to war between Watchers and Immortals as the disaster that James Horton had started. Galati and Shapiro had finished it, but the bluesman knew where the beginning of that chain of emotions and events lay. So his answer seemed perfectly reasonable to him.

"I'm going to take it to the Watchers... and stuff it down their throats until they make it required reading for all our psych people, our admin staff -- everyone who gives assignments to field agents, or keeps an eye on them. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, the field agents need to read it too. I never want to see this kind of crap again in my life, Mac. People are people, buddy, so I'm not sure I can hit 'em hard enough that it never happens again in your life -- but I'm willing to try, y'know?"

Joe glared at him, determined and stubborn, and Duncan just smiled at him, that slow smile that lit up the Scot's face. He lifted his glass and offered the toast: "To the Watchers. May they be outgunned."

Joe grinned, a flash of mischief and deviltry that would have warned Methos to duck or sent Mike Barrett back to the stock room determined to do inventory for a few hours or something else safe and time-consuming. The Watcher raised his own glass, then, and only answered, "Semper Fi, Mac. Semper Fi."

They did grin at each other then, gleeful co-conspirators in a worthy goal that even promised to be fun in places. Joe commented, "When I'm sober tomorrow, Mac, we'll have to talk this over, figure out how to make sure I pull this off. But do you think Amanda would do me a favor if I asked?"

Duncan chuckled at that, a sinful sound that made Joe wonder just what his immortal thought he was up to. "Probably, Joe. She's fond of you for some reason." Joe looked up indignantly and saw the affectionate look he was getting. "What favor?"

"I might want to make copies of this," Joe said slowly. "Just to make sure they don't get pissed and burn it."

"Ah. And Amanda has stashes even the Watchers can't find, I take it?"

Joe leaned back and sipped his whiskey before replying, "Mac, they have no clue in several cases. It's good for 'em, too. But do you think she'd hide one for me?"

"You'll probably regret whatever she asks you to pay for the favor," but Duncan smiled as he said it.

"Actually, I might offer to take a micro-minirecorder into the meeting where we argue this out and let her hear some of it later," Joe told him, still grinning with that fiendish pleasure. He settled the blanket more firmly over his lap and added, "And I'm gonna take you up on that offer of sleeping here, I think."

Duncan just shook his head. "That wasn't even an option. If you're drunk enough to decide to take on the Watchers again, you're spending the night."

"I notice you're not trying to talk me out of it," Joe protested.

"No," Duncan agreed. "I'm not. I'll help as much as I can. I agree with you; this can't happen again."

The bluesman nodded. "No, buddy. It can't. 'Cause next time, the immortals might not stop."

Duncan only nodded. "I'll get you some blankets, and in the morning we'll make some phone calls, Joe."

After they were both settled for the night, a process made easier by the matter-of-fact air Duncan used when helping Joe remove his prosthetic legs, Duncan turned off his bedside lamp. The only light in the loft came from the streetlights outside, a faint trace of light from the bathroom in case Joe woke disoriented, and the fireplace. Duncan's voice slid smoothly into that comforting, womblike dim warmth as he said, "And Joe?"

"Yeah?" the Watcher asked, already half-asleep from the stresses of the day.

"You could never become what Horton did. You had your chance, several times over, my friend."

Joe snorted, tired enough to let the words slip out, and comfortable enough in their friendship not to care. "Yeah, well, **I** never doubted you guys were human, either. Night, Mac."

Duncan's soft laughter was answer enough; Joe fell asleep without hearing whether his immortal, who was also his friend, gave him any other.  


  
_~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~_

Belated notes &amp; commentary:

  
Mea culpa. I should have put this note in from the beginning. Elias Levy is a name I made up; the story of the Jew who attended the Hitler rally, and his reactions, I did not make up.

Mac was smuggling Jews into Sweden, not Denmark; thanks to Malene for pointing out my inaccuracy.

And as long as I'm doing notes: Semper Fi is short for Semper Fidelis, 'Always Faithful' -- the motto of the US Marine Corps. Joe Dawson was a marine in Vietnam.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not my characters; they're R: P/D's. No profit made, either. Sequel to Handled With A Chain. Second and, I hope, last of the Horton stories.  
> Dedication: For Killa, who asked me to write this.


End file.
